Saturday, November 11, 2006

Also on Nov. 7, I watched a really nice TV show with Mustafa Jemilev, leader of the Crimean Tatars. The timing was perfect - a very graceful fuck-you to the kommunyaki on their favorite day.

Jemilev is like a live history book - and he doesn't seem to need any bullshit political charisma because of that.

The show - Pozaochi on K-1 - was about his personal and political life; they interviewed his sister, wife and son, as well as one of his opponents and one of his colleagues. Jemilev was in the studio and was asked to react to what all those people were saying, to elaborate on it.

I loved his son's story: when he was a student in Turkey, he was looking for a restaurant job. At one place, the owner asked him where he was from. Crimea, he said. Oh, you have a great man there, a hero, Mustafa Jemilev, the Turkish guy exclaimed. And Jemilev's son made a mistake of revealing his true identity to him - and didn't get the job as a result, because the restaurant's owner just couldn't allow himself to have a great man's son waiting tables at his place.

***

K-1 seems like a really nice channel, by the way. In addition to Mustafa Jemilev, a documentary about Georgia a few days ago, so interesting, with minimum politics (just enough of it, actually) and maximum Georgian culture, history, customs, etc.